Ha! Surprise concept art ambush!

By which I mean, it’s mostly a surprise to me. I really hadn’t planned to do any kind of graphics this early on, and I kind of don’t really have the time for it. I should be spending that on the things I actually planned to do. But, the user name “Random acts of construction” is not, in fact, entirely random*. This is how I operate. I always need a large project going so my mind has something to focus on and doesn’t wander off and lose itself in some wayward corridor of unimagination where it gets depressed, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t smaller, weirder ideas popping up in my brain all the time that demand at least a bit of attention. For example, the last week I also spent a couple midnight hours before going to bed trying to figure out a solitaire variant that could maybe be built into a pen&paper journaling rpg with a focus on trade (no definitive results yet). I also have a very slow-moving Stars without numbers campaign going on that I play by myself, which further helps keeping me from a creative lull. It’s just not a healthy state for me to be in.

And so, it happened that while worldbuilding, I was overcome by an urge to see something of this world that is taking shape. Not much, just a tiny glimpse of what it might one day look like on the screen. Now, I have been on a google binge every now and then looking for inspirational material. I’m a big fan of the Scifi artwork from the 60ies and 70ies, specifically NASAs concept art, and every now and then some soviet stuff. This whole wave of art was well before my time, actually, but because in Switzerland things always move slower than in the rest of the world, they were still an important part of my childhood, even though I’m an 80ies kid (by which I mean, I didn’t read much before the 90ies). Like, most of my books were from flea markets and used book sales, and I bought up all books about spaceflight as I could find them. And so it came that most of my space knowledge database was a good 20 to 30 years out of date. As was my optimism and enthusiasm about spaceflight. It was a harsh awakening for teen me once he got internet access shortly before the turn of the Millenium.

But I digress. This wasn’t supposed to be about my childhood. I just mention it to show why I had intended to go somewhere into that particular direction with the art style of the game since its very inception. Even though it’s not going to be a retro-future worldbuilding wise, I don’t see why it can’t still use the art style. Except I knew there was no way I could ever replicate it, being not much of an artist.

But during my explorations of the internets vast image landscape, I found other things that intruiged me. It was not the epic, vibrant style usually associated with space imagery from the later half of the 20th century. Rather, a somewhat subdued style in mostly cold colors, with a distinct feeling of lonelyness about it. There isn’t that much of it around, and mostly it was probably a result of printing and/or funding limitations. The best examples I found of it were in this book from 59, which just spoke to me somehow. If I could get that kind of lonely, melancholic atmosphere in my game… yeah, that could work.

And so, with the muse having bitten me while sticking details of my world together with the duct tape of imagination, it started to bug me. I needed to see. And after a quick blender bender and much wailing and gnashing of teeth while trying to figure out Gimp for the umpteenth time (I keep forgetting how it works in the years I don’t use it), this image was the result. It doesn’t have much detail yet, I was mostly concerned with seeing how close I could get something to the style of that book. And for a first piece of concept art, it’s… surprisingly ok, I think.

It’s not in the game yet, obviously, and there won’t be anything like it in the game for some time to come. But I’m now a bit more confident that I might actually be able to put at least something in there before the decision of whether or not to go commercial (i.e. spending money on the project). And, maybe, it helps to illustrate a bit where this is heading. The image you see, by the way, is what is currently Argosy City in high earth orbit in the game (without the large array of photovoltaic sails and propellant storage below it), which is one of the few locations currently in the game which survived the worldbuilding process so far.

So, what about development?

Ah yes, I have actually written some code last month. Mostly, in fact. This little artsy side venture took up only about 20 hours, most of which I did not spend in the timeslot allocated to development. I had intended to write a bit of something about the technical guts of the game, but after me already rambling about my antique childhood reference library, that would take way too long here, so I’m going to do that next time.

Another very important, all new system has been added, though: Status effects. They can affect other things by being present, and they can be present on certain conditions. This may sound rather unspectacular, but the possibilities it opens up are vast. I considered them the most important core system to be missing to make the current prototype halfways engaging. And so I have used that new system to overhaul the current feel of play quite a bit. Drive and burnout are no longer just meaningless stats that may, at some point in the far future, lead to a game over. No, they can now actively make things harder or easier for you, so you’re forced to put some more care into their maintenance. This is in preparation for adding 2 more stats that will need to be maintained lest they make things more difficult, which are vitality (health, kind of, but not only), and the ships condition. This constant maintenance of your character and your assets, that will make things fall apart very quickly if neglected, is what I intend to be at the heart of the secondary loop, and without the status effects, I just couldn’t make that work yet. Now I can, so I’m going to implement the other two as quickly as possible. After that I’ll be back to mission variety, and maybe even putting some locations from my current worldbuilding excercises in there. I mean, they won’t be more than a piece of flavour text yet, but it might help to build some context. But I should really wrap up the UI sound at some point…

One more thing

I’m kind of trying to figure out itch, and some things are not quite intuitive. For example, I created a community section because I thought that would surely be beneficial for people who might want to interact in a more meaningful way than comments and reviews. But I’m slowly learning about some strange decisions, like reviews apparently only being visible to the author of the game, which makes people not use them much. And enabling the community section seems to actually replace comments, not complement them even though they are clearly the preferred way for giving quick feedback. As a result of this, I’m removing the community section again. I think, at least at this stage, comments will be much more convenient for people to leave feedback. Which is still welcome, by the way. I’m not pushing anybody right now because I think I need to get to prototype 2 before trying to get another “large” round of feedback going, but I’m deeply grateful for whoever gives this thing a whirl after an update and tells me what they think of the changes. That’s kind of the reason why I’m releasing intermittently. In any case, I have deactivated the community section in favour of comments, is what I wanted to say.

*It is, in fact, not random at all, but stolen wholesale from the webcomic Freefall. Which you totally should be reading, if you aren’t already.